"There are some private roads near Houston that are owned by the oil companies. We have our own private little races sometimes when we get the roads closed off. And we have some dandies."

America's pioneering astronauts were speed-obsessed gearheads by nature. Then they started running around with a certain Chevrolet dealer.

It was inevitable they'd gravitate to the Indianapolis 500.

Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper was the first, attending the 1963 race. He had made his historic flight aboard Faith 7 — 22 orbits, 34 hours — just two weeks earlier, so at the time he was the nation's latest, hottest "spaceman." He was a national hero, a celebrity.

Celebrities attend the great auto race for different reasons, but a big one is to take advantage of the huge crowds and the pageantry to promote their careers.

Cooper came purely for the sport. He first visited the track on a quiet, thinly attended practice day. He asked race officials if he could take a race car for a spin around the oval. They said no. On race day, Cooper tried to duck the pageantry and get right to the racing. "The biggest name in the country at the moment, … a slim, 36-year-old man dressed in a black sport shirt and sport coat, dark glasses and a white cap," said IndyStar, "tried to slip into the sprawling (Indianapolis Motor Speedway) grounds unnoticed." Once on the grounds, Cooper made a beeline for a "visit to Jim Rathmann shortly before the start of the race."

Rathmann was the Chevy dealer. He was also a race driver. He drove in 14 Indy 500s and won the 1960 race.

The astronauts' training facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla., was 26 miles from Melbourne, where Rathmann had his dealership.Rathmann had Corvette cars and Chevrolet saw the marketing value of the astronauts driving its cars. The company let Rathmann lease Corvettes to them for $1 a year. Cooper, Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard took him up on it. Of the other four, only John Glenn didn't drive a muscled-up sports car.

The first astronauts may have been A-list celebrities, but they answered to NASA. Cooper wanted to ride in the pace car as it led the 33 racers to their famously thrilling running start. But NASA officials nixed that. So instead there was Cooper, waving from the back of a convertible, doing a slow, pre-race loop like the other celebrities, which that year included Mickey Rooney and Connie Stevens.

That was good for public relations because the slower Cooper was paraded, the longer people could cheer him (and perhaps the more supportive they'd be of NASA's substantial budget). IndyStar pronounced Cooper "THE hit" of the day "as an estimated 250,000 spectators stood and cheered the modest space explorer."

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The Coopers, Gordon and Trudy, chow down on fried chicken during the 1963 Indy 500.(Photo: Tim Halcomb/Indianapolis News)

Cooper was back at the Speedway in 1964 with three astronaut colleagues: Shepard, Wally Schirra, and Thomas P. Stafford. Schirra told IndyStar that Indiana native Grissom wanted to come "but was unable to leave the space center at Houston, Tex." Cooper also attended qualifications two weeks before the race. He predicted the 160 mph barrier would fall that year, and he was nearly right — Jim Clark went 159.337 mph. He was becoming an expert. He mentioned again he'd like to "turn a few laps" at the Speedway.

The 1964 race was a ghastly affair, best remembered for a crash in which two drivers died after being engulfed in flames. It was the first race for Donald Davidson, who'd go on to become the Speedway's official historian. Davidson said later that the crash was so awful that he expected Congress to step in and shut down the 500 for keeps.

But Cooper was not deterred. Nor was Grissom, who with his wife, Betty, attended the Indy 500 in 1965. On race day, Grissom played the celebrity, donning a suit and tie and sitting on the back of the pace car as it circled the Speedway during pre-race ceremonies and getting a "thundering ovation."

The next year the astronauts got down to business. Cooper, Grissom and Rathmann, at Rathmann's suggestion, bought a rear-engine supercharged Offenhauser called the Pure Firebird Special. They entered the car in the 1966 Indy 500.

Cooper and Grissom at first were silent partners but soon admitted they were the "G" and the "C" in "G.C.R. Inc.," the car's registered owner. They hadn't notified NASA of their venture, and NASA was not happy. "We were called on the carpet for it," Cooper said a month later.

"That bothered me because I figure this is part of our private life and didn't seem right for them to be regulating it. I figured it was part of our recreation and hobby interest. But when we got to the right people, there was no problem at all. Gus and I and some of the other astronauts are real interested in racing. Gus has a competition Corvette and I have a single-overhead cam 427 Ford that can go 180.

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Gus Grissom takes his father for a spin, location unknown but possibly in Mitchell, Ind., Grissom's hometown. June 10, 1962(Photo: Bob Daugherty/Indianapolis Star)

"There are some private roads near Houston that are owned by the oil companies. We have our own private little races sometimes when we get the roads closed off. And we have some dandies."

Greg Weld was hired to drive the Pure Firebird Special. Weld crashed the car on his final qualification attempt. The car was repaired, and Art Pollard drove it the rest of the season and had his best finishes, a fourth and a seventh, in races at the Milwaukee Mile track. Cooper and Grissom, when they had a weekend off from NASA, worked on Pollard's pit crew.

In June 1966, while helping prep the car for a race at Indianapolis Raceway Park, Cooper expressed more firmly his desire to drive a race car. "Sometime, before the summer's out, I intend to get our car on a race track and check out in it," he said. "And then I'd like to run it in a race. I'm serious about this."

Grissom was feeling the desire for speed, too. Months later he ordered from Rathmann a new Corvette, a 1967 convertible specially geared and modified in the rear to accommodate extra-wide racing tires. It was his last Corvette. Grissom died at Cape Canaveral Jan. 27, 1967, along with astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee when fire swept through their spacecraft during a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission.

Cooper and Rathmann returned to the Indy 500 that May with another race car. Grissom was gone, but they continued to call their team G.C.R. They tried something new: They got corporate sponsorship from Smirnoff, the vodka maker, and agreed to name their race car the Smirnoff Skyball, the name of a cocktail Smirnoff was promoting.

The drink was basically a vodka tonic, but it was the focus of an expansive advertising campaign built around the concept of space travel. Full page ads in magazines showed a man and a woman wearing party clothes, holding hands and floating weightless above the earth. In their hands were drinks, presumably Smirnoff Skyballs, and behind the couple floated a fully decked-out spaceman giving a thumbs-up. The ad copy claimed that: 1) The Smirnoff Skyball "leaves all other tonic drinks back on the pad"; 2) "there's not too much mixer to dampen the fuel"; and 3) "Whoosh!"

Speedway officials nixed the deal because it didn't allow sponsorships from hard liquor companies, said Davidson. He notes that beer companies had sponsored race cars since the repeal of Prohibition. And in recent years, Fuzzy's Vodka has been a sponsor.

In the end, Smirnoff's snub didn't matter because Cooper's and Rathmann's car, driven by Bobby Johns, failed to qualify for the race.

But Smirnoff got something. It sponsored the hot air balloon that won a race held the week before the 500 and sponsored by the 500 Festival. The balloon was called the Smirnoff Skyball.

In the very end, the astronaut who was laughing loudest was Wally Schirra.

After the 500, it was revealed that Schirra very quietly ("no publicity has been given out," said IndyStar) had been a part owner of the race car driven by Joe Leonard.

In July 1967, Gordon Cooper was permitted to take a low-speed spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.(Photo: AP)

Leonard finished third.

Finally, in July 1967, Cooper at last got what he'd long wanted, sort of. Speedway officials allowed him to climb into a race car and take a few laps. They prohibited him, however, from standing on the gas and running all out.

Call IndyStar reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.